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Catherine Wagley
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Bodyscapes
by Catherine Wagley
Naotaka Hiro at The Box
May 10th, 2008 - June 7th, 2008
Posted
6/1/08
Naotaka Hiro covered the front windows of The Box gallery with plywood in order to better control the light in his installation. The plywood planks are surprisingly lyrical. Their grain complements the bodily, earthy hue of Hiro's work and the covered windows make the space feel like a makeshift, underground theatre.
Bodily fluids and body parts in art used to be risqué. But nothing about Hiro's show is scandalous. In Hiro's work, bodies are enthralling because of their uncertain, rhyth... [more]
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Interview with Emilie Halpern
by Catherine Wagley
2008-05-30
Los Angeles - Emilie Halpern deals with monumental ideas but she does so in a quiet, subdued way. The work in her new exhibition focuses on little gestures, like covering the moon with a thumb or hearing the heartbeat of a blue whale, but, together, these gestures begin to build a picture of the whole, birth-to-death process of living.
I met Emilie at Anna Helwing Gallery and she gave me a dynamic tour of her show Abracadabra, explaining the fluent threads that tie her work together. In the following... [more]
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Chris Burden at BCAM
by Catherine Wagley
Posted
4/6/08
Wilshire is a tall, shallow street. The buildings loom over the boulevard, but if you walk back less than a block past the street, you find yourself in a residential world of houses and single story structures. LACMA has always been an anomaly on Wilshire, but BCAM is an even stranger addition. It defies Wilshire’s shallowness by having a back entrance and a life that one can’t access from the street. Luckily, Chris Burden’s lampposts act as a go-between. People congregate in... [more]
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A Look at Marc Handelman
by Catherine Wagley
Marc Handelman at Marc Selwyn Fine Art
March 15th, 2008 - April 19th, 2008
Posted
4/6/08
It’s hard to tell whether Marc Handelman’s work is coming or going. Handelman’s current exhibition seems to either move further into the abstract desolation that characterized Rothko’s gray paintings or into the transparency of corporate design. The deceivingly optimistic title of his show at Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Tomorrow’s Forecast: Strikingly Clear, suggests that Handelman’s work is indeed coming, moving into the flashy straightforwardness of industrial, co... [more]
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A Look at Justin Beal
by Catherine Wagley
Justin Beal at ACME
March 22nd, 2008 - April 19th, 2008
Posted
4/6/08
Justin Beal’s first solo show at ACME gallery is sleek, minimal, excessively composed, and surprisingly guileless. Cast Pomegranate Juice bottles and stretch-wrapped plants could easily suggest a contrived attempt at cultural criticism, but in Beal’s work, the glass, stretch-wrap, and POM bottles instead suggest an endearing preoccupation with pretentious design and pop culture. Art making involves brutal honesty. Lucky for most artists, the honesty doesn’t necessarily have to be... [more]
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A Look at Betalevel
by Catherine Wagley
Posted
3/2/08
Located in the basement at 963 N. Hill St., Betalevel is a club, a stage, and a haven for the interactive arts. The perfect antidote to Chinatown’s galleries, Betalevel features the kind of art that can’t hang on walls. Visit Betalevel on March 8th for This is Not My Beautiful Writing: A Reading Where People Read Writing that They Did Not Write, or on March 15th for readings from the anthology A Sing Economy.
Betalevel
963 N. Hill Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012
http://betalevel.com
- Catherine Wagley
(Photo... [more]
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Beauty’s Dark Side
by Catherine Wagley
Eduardo Consuegra, Morgan Fisher, Richard Hawkins, William E. Jones, Brian Kennon, Hedi El Kholti, Elad Lassry, Michele O'Marah at Mandarin Gallery
February 9th, 2008 - March 22nd, 2008
Posted
3/2/08
Mandarin Gallery’s current exhibition is a conundrum. You, Whose Beauty Was Famous in Rome, curated by young LA art scene figures Andrew Berardini and Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, is both wily and gapingly tender, leaving you torn between the charm of the appropriated imagery and the works' darker side. Much of the dapper collage and photography by the show’s eight artists has the same fugitive allure as the defaced books that got 1960's British writers Joe Orton and Kenneth Haliwell into... [more]
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All About The Stripes
by Catherine Wagley
Dancia Phelps at Kathryn Brennan Gallery
February 9th, 2008 - March 22nd, 2008
Posted
3/2/08
It is all about the stripes. It is about the way the stripes represent systems, labor, and relentless reproduction. It is about the way each stripe is at once an individual and also one part of many. It is about the net effect of the stripes, when they join together to create a tapestry-like sea of vacillating vertical lines.
There is much about the stripes in Danica Phelps’ Stripe Factory exhibition at Sister Gallery to take in. Rather than simply experience the incredible swath of infor... [more]
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Industry Café and Jazz
by Catherine Wagley
Posted
2/3/08
The Culver City Art and Design District is serious business. Though it does have a history, Culver City is not as glaringly glamorous as Beverly Hills and it’s not a neighborhood with as evident a heritage as Chinatown. Instead, it comes off as being self-sufficiently driven to promote the arts. Consequently, a restaurant called the Industry Café couldn’t be a better fit for Culver City’s industrious vibe. The Industry Café and Jazz club has been a part of the Culver City scene for two ye... [more]
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An Eerie Take on Leisure
by Catherine Wagley
Corina Gamma at d.e.n. contemporary art
January 19th, 2008 - February 23rd, 2008
Posted
2/3/08
Corina Gamma takes an unnerving look at LA recreation in her current solo exhibition at d.e.n. contemporary. A show of relatively small, sleek photographs of amusement parks could come off as a piquant gesture, especially with a whimsical title like (un)Restricted Pleasure. But Gamma’s discreet representations of carnival rides and suburban developments are compelling because of their sinister undercurrent.Near the end of her first novel, The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf describes light as “Unbroken by clouds” and “falling through th... [more]
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Sublime Slang
by Catherine Wagley
Jon-Paul Villegas at Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery
January 19th, 2008 - February 23rd, 2008
Posted
2/3/08
Jon-Paul Villegas’s installation at Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery is a crude habitat of carefully crafted paraphernalia. The exhibition, appropriately titled Heavy Light, combines an overload of eclectic “stuff” with an exquisitely traditional attention to aesthetic beauty. Villegas pushes the sensibility of ephemeral installation art like that of Susan Hiller or Annette Messager, presenting a slang version of the sublime. And there’s something about slang that always makes you feel like you’r... [more]
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Gilded Sofas
by Catherine Wagley
Posted
1/6/08
The stretch of Melrose Avenue that connects West Hollywood and Beverly Hills is the self-proclaimed Art and Design District of Los Angeles, which means that it’s strewn with fancy furniture galleries and showrooms. Right now, the store front windows are boasting gilded sofas, bureaus and mirrors that recall French salons of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. If you visit Regen Projects or M+B Gallery, you can take in all the sleekly politicized contemporary art that you can hand... [more]
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No Need for Interpretation
by Catherine Wagley
Guy de Cointet at Overduin and Kite
December 19th, 2007 - January 26th, 2008
Posted
1/6/08
Guy de Cointet, one of the Los Angeles art community’s enigmas, never quite fit into any one genre, partly because he was so completely engaged in multiple genres in the 60's and 70's. He drew with the sensibility of a surrealist, sculpted with the aesthetics of a minimalist, played with structural linguistics, borrowed from literary scholarship, treated theatre like it was performance art and performance art like it was theatre. But the autonomy that Guy de Cointet gave to each form of signage tha... [more]
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Authentic Tabloid Fictions
by Catherine Wagley
Alison Jackson at M+B
December 15th, 2007 - January 23rd, 2008
Posted
1/6/08
Confidential, Alison Jackson’s current exhibition at M+B Gallery, is a vulgar landscape of tabloid-inspired imagery: Britney Spears gets liposuction; Paris Hilton is disrobed in the prison shower; Cocaine Kate and wily Pete Doherty shoot up. Yet, despite the risqué content, Jackson’s images provide a chic, almost ephemeral, version of scandal. While the typical tabloid shot has a spur-of-the moment, caught-in-the-act quality, Jackson’s images are certainly calculated. Often symmetrically composed... [more]
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No White Cube in Chinatown
by Catherine Wagley
Posted
12/2/07
If you go into galleries in Beverly Hills and Wilshire—like Gagosian, Ace, or Regen Projects—the natural light is blocked by either white walls or misted windows. Not so in Chinatown. Chinatown is characterized by its unending expanse of big windows and, with little exception, Chinatown’s galleries embrace the homey, inviting feel of the windowed storefront. John Pylyphuck and Any Ouchie might be as well established in the art world as artists showing in Culver City, but, when their work is i... [more]
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Disorderly Self-Portrait
by Catherine Wagley
Kristine Roepstorff at peres projects - LA
November 16th, 2007 - December 22nd, 2007
Posted
12/2/07
Kristine Roepstorff’s solo show at Peres Projects, titled It’s not the eye of the needle that changed—The Self, is the second installation in a three part exhibition. The exhibition started at The Drawing Center in New York with It’s not the eye of the needle that changed—Time. The third installation, The Frame, will occur in Peres Project’s Art Basel booth in Miami. Roepstorff, a Danish artist who works in Berlin, usually makes intensely complicated and intelligently composed collage. But her work for Th... [more]
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Blood Pact
by Catherine Wagley
Seann Bracken, Naomi Buckley, Spencer Douglass, Aragna Ker, Candice Lin, Maeghan Reid at Happy Lion
November 10th, 2007 - December 22nd, 2007
Posted
12/2/07
The Sundowners isn’t a group show; it’s a one-minded collective. The work belongs together, as if the six artists secretly made a blood pact and then brought the fruits of their séance to The Happy Lion Gallery. The gallery space becomes a communal terrain within which dislodged narratives attempt to find their place. The six artists featured in The Sundowners are all in the early stages of their careers, having graduated from MFA programs at Claremont Graduate University and the San Francis... [more]
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Pansies at the Beverly Wilshire
by Catherine Wagley
Posted
11/9/07
When I go from gallery to gallery, I often have trouble envisioning art work in “real spaces.” Gallery hopping seems akin to seeing work in its natural habitat: Carl Andre’s sculptures belong at Ace as much as a cactus belongs in the desert. That’s why I had to laugh when I left Ace Gallery’s massive Beverly Hills space and turned off of Wilshire Boulevard. Hanging in the garage of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, I saw two huge paintings of pansies. Canopied by the vines and flora growing up a... [more]
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Grown-up Vulnerability
by Catherine Wagley
Tracey Emin at Gagosian Gallery - Beverly Hills
November 2nd, 2007 - December 22nd, 2007
Posted
11/9/07
Hanging a Tracey Emin show is no small feat, since the boundary-crossing British artist uses neon and bronze as prolifically as she uses paint. But You Left Me Breathing at Gagosian Gallery is incredibly well hung. In the main gallery, Emin’s monumental acrylic paintings dialogue with her flashy neon flower and her patinated bronze sculptures seem to embody the vulnerable self-searching that her paintings narrate. The small drawings and monoprints hung upstairs and in the back gallery hold their... [more]
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Minimalist Brain Tease
by Catherine Wagley
Carl Andre at Ace Gallery- Beverly Hills
October 20th, 2007 - February 21st, 2008
Posted
11/9/07
Carl Andre’s zinc squares turn Beverly Hills’ Ace Gallery into brain tease. The reflective surfaces of the zinc, paired with the repetition of the 16”x16”x ¼” plates, make it difficult to read the exhibition’s progression. You might have to take a few frustrating turns around Ace’s multiple galleries before you figure out that the first square of zinc is arranged two plates by two plates and that the last is arranged ten by ten. But the show, while a mind bender, is paradoxica... [more]
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